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1. Present yourself: who are you and where can you be found?My name is Scott Butki. I was a professional newspaper reporter but now I work with special needs adults but write analysis, satire, fiction, etc at Newsvine with sbutki.newsvine.com as my home page there. 2. How do you see the future of online communities and web 2.0? (not an easy question, I know, but you can choose, how to answer)That IS a hard one. If you give me a more specific question I can answer it better. Not sure how web 2.0 will be different from 1.0.
3. What kind of features you do not like at social media site?I’m not a fan of the flashy stuff, like more graphics be it avatars and such. I like the emphasis on the text. When just having a conversation via text you can actually get more deep and in-depth when you focus just on the text than you often can in “real life” but add avatars and such and that can get distracting (Pasi: I think that it is not possible to build a site suitable for all and this is where some sites go wrong. Instead of adding every nice feature, you should find out, what your members really want and need, and concentrate on those demands.) 4. As we already have laws, do you think that online communities still need to have their own rules?I think each community should have its own rules. As Howard Rheingold (if you don’t know him, you should, he literally wrote the book on virtual communities and I’m in one of his private communities) has said, and is his slogan for at least: “it is.. what you make it.”
A community can choose to make it a place for sophisticated thinking. Or it can make itself into something like dig which in my opinion isn’t even really much of a community. That, though, prompts the question of “what IS A community” and I’m writing this too early in the morning to answer that one.
But I digress. Laws? What kind of laws?
Rules? Yes I think communities need to have rules but of their own selection to the most extent. For example, there are some staples – no plagiarism, no personal attacks – but I think each community then has to get get more specific (what defines a personal attack, what should the punishment be? What should the punishment be for plagiarism? Expulsion? Suspension?
I think it’s important for the community to have input and thus investment in creation of some of these rules but ultimately the site owner has to get the final say. 5. Is there something more you wish to say and do you wish to share any inks with us?Yes. It’s important in life (on-line and off-line) to spend more time listening/reading others than speaking yourself. Not only is it respectful and will elecit more from others but it will also help you more in the long run. (link to listening matters)
I think it’s good for each community to have a place where people can introduce themselves (at newsvine it is here)
http://sbutki.newsvine.com/_news/2007/10/19/1037120-new-and-old-members-introduce-yourself-here?last=1219160942
and a place where they can point out their own best stuff and a place where someone – preferably at the site level – point out some of the best articles around. This helps people get feedback and attention on the best material as opposed to all the subpar stuff that might get more attention.
It also doesn’t hurt to try to help writers improve themselves, which is my latest campaign at newsvine:
Scott Butki, http://sbutki.newsvine.com
(Where I write, think, talk about what I'm writing, reading, listening to, viewing, etc. Pasi: Thank you Scott
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